The Taming of the Shrew

• 1. Introduction

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  The Taming of the Shrew opens not with a wedding or a courtship, but with a prank. A mischievous nobleman finds a drunken tinker named Christopher Sly passed out, and decides to convince him he is a nobleman himself. Servants dress Sly in fine clothes. They provide him with a wife, who is actually a page boy named Bartholomew in disguise. Then, to complete the illusion, they stage a play for his entertainment. That play is the story of Katherina and Petruchio. Written by William Shakespeare between 1590 and 1592, The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy layered inside a trick. At its heart is a courtship built on conflict: a woman whose fierce independence earns her the label of shrew, and a man who sets out to break her. What follows raises questions that four centuries of audiences, scholars, and directors have never fully settled. Is the play a celebration of female subjugation? A satire that damns its own male characters? Or something more irreducibly strange, a farce performed for a sleeping drunkard that was never meant to be taken seriously at all?

• 2. The Plot's Architecture

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  Baptista Minola, a lord in Padua, has two daughters whose fortunes are entirely entangled. His younger daughter, Bianca, is adored by multiple suitors including Hortensio and Gremio, and is regarded as the ideal woman. But Baptista has sworn that Bianca may not marry until Katherina, his elder daughter, is wed first. Katherina's notorious assertiveness drives men away, and so, in a neat irony, her suitors must find a husband for the woman they deem unworthy of marriage just to clear the path to Bianca. Into this situation arrives Petruchio, coming to Padua from Verona after his father's death, in search of a wife. His friend Hortensio recruits him for Katherina almost immediately. Meanwhile, a new arrival named Lucentio has fallen in love with Bianca. He disguises himself as a Latin tutor called Cambio so he can court her without Baptista's knowledge. His servant Tranio impersonates Lucentio, bids for Bianca as a formal suitor, and promises a dowry far beyond what Lucentio actually possesses. This sets off a chain of impostures: Hortensio disguises himself as a music tutor named Litio to gain access to Bianca; a passing pedant is recruited to impersonate Lucentio's father, Vincentio, and confirm the fictional dowry; and Bianca, fully aware of the deceptions surrounding her, slips away to marry the real Lucentio in secret. The two competing plots converge in the final scene when three newly married couples gather, Lucentio and Bianca, Hortensio and a widow, and Petruchio and Katherina, for a wager over whose wife will come when called.

• 3. The Language War

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  Karen Newman observed that from the play's first scenes, Katherina's threat to male authority is expressed entirely through language. After she rebukes Hortensio and Gremio in Act 1, Scene 1, Hortensio responds with the line "From all such devils, good Lord deliver us!" Even her own father calls her "thou hilding of a devilish spirit" at 2.1.26. Petruchio's strategy is to weaponize language against itself. He announces in Act 2, Scene 1 that whatever Katherina says or does, he will misinterpret it as its opposite: if she rails, he will tell her she sings like a nightingale; if she is silent, he will call her eloquent. Margaret Jane Kidnie describes this as an attack on the "slipperiness of language", undermining the basic relationship between a word and what it means. Beyond misinterpretation, Petruchio uses language to declare Katherina his property. In Act 3, Scene 2, he tells the assembled company: "She is my goods, my chattels, she is my house,/My household stuff, my field, my barn,/My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing." He also compares her repeatedly to a hawk, deploying a falconry metaphor in Act 4, Scene 1, lines 177 to 183: "My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,/And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged." Katherina resists. In Act 4, Scene 3, she delivers a declaration of linguistic independence, insisting that no matter what Petruchio does, she will always be free to speak her mind. Yet barely a hundred lines later, Petruchio demands she agree with him about the time of day, even when she knows he is wrong. Kidnie argues the game has changed at this point. What had been misinterpretation becomes a direct test of dominance: Petruchio has the authority to rename their world, and Katherina must agree. The culmination comes in Act 4, Scene 5, when Katherina agrees to call the sun the moon, and vows, "if you please to call it a rush-candle,/Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me" (4.5.14-15). Her language, and her apparent self, have been remade.

• 4. The Induction's Purpose

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  Christopher Sly falls asleep during the play being staged for him, a detail H.J. Oliver uses to press a pointed question: are we to let a play that cannot hold a drunken tinker's attention preach morality to us? Oliver argues the Induction exists precisely to remove the audience from the reality of the Katherina/Petruchio story. By placing the framing story on the same level of reality as the audience, and the enclosed play on a different, more artificial level, Shakespeare ensures that what happens to Katherina reads as farce rather than doctrine. Marjorie Garber puts a sharper spin on this: she suggests Shakespeare may have created the Induction as a pre-emptive defense against charges of sexism, a way to keep the audience from reacting badly to Petruchio's treatment of Katherina. Stanley Wells, writing about Jonathan Miller's 1980 BBC Television Shakespeare adaptation, which cut the Induction entirely, argued that to omit the Christopher Sly episodes is to "suppress one of Shakespeare's most volatile lesser characters, to jettison most of the play's best poetry, and to strip it of an entire dramatic dimension." Graham Holderness goes further, arguing that without the Sly framework, any production of the play is thrown much more passively at the mercy of the director's ideology, because it is the Induction's metadramatic layer that forces the play's patriarchal content into self-contradiction. Coppelia Kahn adds that Sly's own transformation, from a lout convinced he is a lord, a transformation that is temporary and illusory, prepares the audience to read Katherina's apparent conversion with skepticism. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen put it plainly: "the Sly framework establishes a self-referential theatricality in which the status of the shrew-play as a play is enforced."

• 5. The Misogyny Debate

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  Dana Aspinall traces the controversy back to the play's very first appearance, noting it has generated "heartily supportive, ethically uneasy, or altogether disgusted responses" from its earliest audiences. George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1897 that no man with any decency of feeling could sit through the play in the company of a woman without being ashamed of its moral. Phyllis Rackin argues the play seems to validate oppressive assumptions about women as timeless truths. Stevie Davies notes that critical responses have been dominated by embarrassment and "the desire to prove that Shakespeare cannot have meant what he seems to be saying." Four main readings of Katherina's final speech, the longest speech in the play, have taken shape over the critical tradition. Some critics take it as sincere: Petruchio has genuinely tamed her. Others read it as sincere for a different reason: she has fallen in love with him. A third group reads it as irony, a performance of submission that actually represents her triumph over him. A fourth group, following Oliver, argues the speech should not be read seriously in either direction, because it is part of a farce staged for a sleeping tinker. Meryl Streep, who played Katherina in 1978 at the Shakespeare in the Park festival, offered the second reading, saying that "really what matters is that they have an incredible passion and love." Conall Morrison, directing the RSC 2008 production, went in a different direction entirely, arguing the play is a satire, that by the final scene "all of the men are gleeful and relieved to see" Katherina crushed, and that this is so evidently repellent that Shakespeare must be condemning it. Jonathan Miller, who directed the 1980 BBC adaptation, resisted both poles. He argued that reading the play as feminist is "irresponsible and silly," but that it should equally not be dismissed as simple misogyny. For Miller, the play reflects a genuine early modern worldview in which social order depended on hierarchy, and productions that deny this become "boring, thin and tractarian." Leah S. Marcus adds a dimension from the textual debate: she argues that A Shrew, the related play many scholars consider derived from The Shrew, is more progressive, and that scholars resist attributing it to Shakespeare in part because "the women are not as satisfactorily tamed" in it.

• 6. Sources and Origins

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  No single source explains the whole play. The framing trick of a commoner convinced he is a lord appears in Arabian Nights, where Harun al-Rashid plays it on a man he finds sleeping in an alley. A nearly identical episode appears in a 1584 Dutch historical work, De Rebus Burgundicis by Pontus de Huyter, in which Philip, Duke of Burgundy, entertains a drunken artisan with a comedy after attending his sister's wedding in Portugal. Arabian Nights was not translated into English until the mid-18th century, though Shakespeare may have known the story by word of mouth. For the Petruchio and Katherina story, the closest literary relative that scholars have identified is tale 35 from the fourteenth-century Spanish book Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio by Don Juan Manuel, which tells of a young man who marries a "very strong and fiery woman." In 1964, Richard Hosley proposed that the main source was an anonymous ballad, "A merry jeste of a shrewde and curst Wyfe, lapped in Morrelles Skin." The ballad shares the two-sister structure and features a husband who tames his wife, but the taming in it is far more brutal: the woman is beaten with birch rods until she bleeds, then wrapped in the salted flesh of a plough horse. In 1966, Jan Harold Brunvand challenged all literary-source theories by arguing the Petruchio and Katherina story came not from any printed text but from oral tradition. He discovered 383 oral examples of the shrew-taming story type, which he classified as Type 901 in the Aarne-Thompson system, spread across thirty European countries, but only 35 literary examples. Most modern critics accept his conclusion. The subplot involving Bianca's suitors was traced by Alfred Tolman in 1890 to Ludovico Ariosto's I Suppositi, published in 1551, and its English prose adaptation by George Gascoigne, Supposes, performed in 1566 and printed in 1573. Even two character names, Tranio and Grumio, Shakespeare likely lifted from the Roman playwright Plautus, whose Mostellaria features both.

• 7. Dating and the A Shrew Problem

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  Establishing when Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew is entangled with one of the most persistent puzzles in Shakespearean studies: its relationship to a separate play, A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called the taming of a Shrew, which has an almost identical plot but entirely different character names and wording. A Shrew was entered in the Stationers' Register on the 2nd of May 1594, providing a firm end point. The beginning of the window is harder to pin down. A stage direction in A Shrew at 3.21 mentions "Simon," almost certainly referring to the actor Simon Jewell, who was buried on the 21st of August 1592. Anthony Chute's Beauty Dishonoured, published in June 1593, contains the line "He calls his Kate, and she must come and kiss him," which corresponds to a scene in The Shrew but not in A Shrew. The anonymous play A Knack To Know A Knave, first performed at The Rose on the 10th of June 1592, borrows passages unique to The Shrew, suggesting The Shrew was already on stage before that date. In his 1982 Oxford Shakespeare edition, H.J. Oliver argues the play was composed no later than 1592, citing evidence that Pembroke's Men had it in their possession when they left London for a regional tour on the 23rd of June 1592. That tour, which took them to Bath and Ludlow, was a financial failure; the company returned to London on the 28th of September, ruined. Over the following years they published four plays, including A Shrew in May 1594. Oliver reads these publications as distress sales by broke company members. Keir Elam has argued for a start date no earlier than 1591, noting that Shakespeare appears to have borrowed from Abraham Ortelius' map of Italy in the fourth edition of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which explains why he incorrectly places Padua in Lombardy rather than Veneto: Ortelius' map labels all of northern Italy as Lombardy. Elam also suggests Shakespeare drew Italian dialogue from John Florio's Second Fruits, published in 1591. The scholarly consensus, as Gary Taylor summarized it, places composition around 1590 to 1591, with most evidence pointing to late 1591 or early 1592. The five competing theories about the A Shrew relationship, from simple coincidence based on a lost shared source, to bad quarto, to early draft, to adaptation by another hand, remain unresolved. Brian Morris, writing in his 1981 Arden Shakespeare edition, captured the impasse: "unless new, external evidence comes to light, the relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew can never be decided beyond a peradventure."

• 8. Afterlife and Adaptation

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  John Fletcher, who succeeded Shakespeare as house playwright for the King's Men, wrote a direct sequel around 1611. The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, picks up after Katherina's death, as Petruchio remarries and finds his new wife turning the tables on him. Lynda Boose argues that Fletcher's response "may in itself reflect the kind of discomfort that Shrew has characteristically provoked in men," and that the play's many revisions since 1594 have "repeatedly contrived ways of softening the edges." Among the most famous later adaptations are Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate, and the 1967 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. McLintock!, a 1963 American Western comedy starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, transplants the story to the frontier. Two films from the late 1990s and early 2000s drew on the play more loosely: the 1999 high-school comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, and the 2003 romantic comedy Deliver Us from Eva. In the editing history of the printed text, Alexander Pope's 1725 edition began incorporating extracts from A Shrew into The Shrew, adding the fuller Christopher Sly framework that A Shrew includes. Subsequent editors including Lewis Theobald in 1733, Thomas Hanmer in 1744, and Samuel Johnson and George Steevens in 1765 continued adding A Shrew material. Edmond Malone removed all those additions in his 1790 edition and returned the text to the 1623 First Folio, where The Shrew had first been published. The Shrew itself did not appear in print until that First Folio; the only quarto of the play, printed by William Stansby for John Smethwick in 1631, was based on the Folio text and titled A Wittie and Pleasant comedie called The Taming of the Shrew.